Death Valley (10 page)

The terror lasted only seconds. Lieutenant Ronald had been just
behind him, and he sprinted past Besardi and pumped his M16 into the gook until he stopped moving. They policed up the area, searching the bodies and the three packs left behind. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Besardi. The NVA had many people on that path and they’d been fully equipped. Why did they retreat from a platoon?

L
ieutenant Weh, commanding officer of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division, stood on a knoll of the Hot Dog as the sun sank on 11 August 1969. He was looking south. Paddy fields encircled his hilltop and rambled south for several hundred meters to a tree line. It sat like an island in the untilled rice paddies, overgrowing an abandoned village. Weh tried to peer into it. In the fading light, he was doing what he’d done a hundred times before, accessing the terrain, gauging likely avenues of enemy attack. He had an intuitive feeling that night, absorbed from six years as an enlisted Marine, three years of commissioned service, and from fourteen months in Vietnam.

He could feel the enemy in that tree line.

There was no logical explanation. Working in tandem with Delta Company that afternoon, they had picked the wood line clean. They found nothing. But now Weh could feel them watching from in there. If they were going to attack, this would be their last chance. The battalion was preparing to move north in the morning, a final one- or two-day sweep to the Vu Gia, then out of the Arizona and back into Dodge City.

That last night, Bravo was on an eastern knoll.

Delta was on another knoll a hundred meters west.

Charlie was almost three kilometers farther west.

Alpha was already north along the Song Vu Gia.

The Battalion CP and H&S Company were set up near Bravo and Delta on a third knoll of the Hot Dog; from above, their independent
but nearby perimeters looked like the points of a triangle. A jump CP was with Charlie.

Everyone was working under standard procedure.

Lieutenant Weh’s headquarters occupied a space perhaps ten square yards atop a twenty-meter mound; it was the center of his company’s perimeter and holes were spaced in the scrub brush for himself, his gunnery sergeant, a company radioman, battalion radioman, and his forward observation lieutenant and radioman (the FO teams were attached from the 11th Marines). Weh had his three rifle platoons deployed in a tight circle at the bottom of his hillock, where the slope meshed with the rice fields. The soil was hard, dry, and rocky; the grunts chipped out small foxholes, no more than three feet deep, and shallow sleeping areas in case mortars hit while they were off watch. 1st Platoon (Lieutenant Campbell) faced south; 3d (Lieutenant Schirmerhorn) faced south and east; 2d (Lieutenant Albers) faced north. Each platoon had a hundred-yard frontage, ten yards between foxholes, two men to a hole. Trip flares were rigged and claymore mines faced forward, detonating cord reeled back to the foxholes.

Two tree-lined fingers jutted from the knoll and pointed at the tree line. The shorter of the two extended from the eastern rim of the perimeter (Campbell), the longer from the western (Schirmerhorn); Weh had both send out squads after dark to avoid detection. They set in as listening posts at the tips to watch that murky tree line and to protect the concealed approaches that these fingers of land provided an enemy.

Bravo’s hillock fell into a saddle which rose to a second hillock some hundred meters west. Captain Fagan’s Delta Company dug in around it. They also were in a tight perimeter, and Fagan too was suspicious of the tree line to the south. A brushy mound sat about seventy-five yards in front of Delta’s lines, and he dispatched a fire team and an M60 team to it.

The saddle between Bravo and Delta rose gently to a third hillock a bit to the north, still on the Hot Dog ridge. The battalion command post, supervised by Maj Robert B. Alexander, the S-3 operations officer, was dug in there with Capt J. W. Huffman’s H&S Company. The CP and H&S personnel performed their own security, but the grunts usually bitched if they had to set up near them. The cluster of radio aerials was an irresistible target to NVA mortarmen; and the H&S Marines were more likely to make noise in the dark—talking, coughing, walking
around, opening soda cans and C rations, even having cooking fires. At least the grunts said so.

Lieutenant Hord’s Charlie Company was about two-and-a-half klicks west of the Hot Dog, dug in around a tiny abandoned ville in another tree line island. Lieutenant Colonel Dowd and his jump CP were with them. Captain Clark’s Alpha Company was even farther from the Hot Dog, helicoptered north to positions along the Vu Gia. They were to be the block for the next day’s battalion sweep. This was to be their last night in the infamous Arizona.

Nerves were clicking. It had been too easy.

The tension became real sometime after midnight when all three listening posts from Bravo and Delta began whispering into their radios. There were noises … then murky figures just visible in the paddies … then hushed Vietnamese voices. In the dark, it was impossible to tell what was approaching them, and the teams were instructed to remain in place to further gauge the situation. Sometimes the few are sacrificed to alert the many. At 0415, it happened: a trip flare suddenly popped in the paddies near Bravo Three’s LP on the long finger, followed by a hasty exchange of fire. Lieutenant Weh, half-asleep in a hole with his radioman, instantly rolled out from under his poncho and took the radio handset. He asked the squad leader with the LP what was going on. The response was a strained whisper, “I don’t know, but there’s a lot of people moving out here.”

What was out there was the 8th and 9th Battalions,
90th NVA Regiment
, reinforced by a battalion from the
368B NVA Rocket Regiment
, and their plan was to completely overrun the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines.

The Marines knew none of this yet.

Moments before the LP was hit, the 81mm Mortar Platoon of H&S Company was alerted. They had four tubes up and their section leader, SSgt “Flash” Gordon, had his radios in a poncho-covered foxhole. He stuck out his head and called to Gun Number One, “Zotter, we got movement in front of us.” LCpl Charles Zotter was on watch at the time; he was a nineteen-year-old high school dropout who’d been given the choice of the Marine Corps or jail because of his street gang activities. He’d been in-country thirteen months, and he moved quickly. He roused his partners in the shallow mortar pit, then picked up an illumination round and clicked the time fuse on the nose to three seconds. That
meant the shell would burst before it reached its highest point, before the NVA who heard the pop of the round leaving the tube could run to cover.

Then came that first burst of fire. Zotter instantly dropped the ilium round down the tube, and the black hill was bathed in white light. The next second, the H&S Marines opened fire—a frantic downhill sweep of M16 and M60 fire, a virtual wall of red tracers. There were North Vietnamese all over their hillside. They were NVA sappers, wearing only shorts, coming uphill with satchel charges and grenades and unreeling detonation cord behind them. Someone had jumped the gun, though, for they were only halfway up. They ran back, some tumbling in the fire from the foxholes. Zotter saw one clearly; he was running, clawing at his back as bullets thudded into it, stumbling, finally collapsing on his face.

In moments, the NVA disappeared.

The firing continued, most of it concentrated near that long finger in front of Lieutenant Schirmerhorn’s platoon in the Bravo line. After that first conversation with the LP, Weh had gotten his FO out of his hole. Within fifteen minutes, artillery from the 11th Marines in An Hoa was slamming into that southern tree line and around the listening post. Weh also contacted battalion to scramble air support. That took longer, but within an hour, a USAF C119 prop plane was orbiting, pouring fire down from its electric-powered miniguns (a variation of the old gatling gun).

The grunts called these gunships Spooky; each minigun fired 6,000 rounds a minute, which was good because, by the time it came on station, Weh was up against an NVA force larger than he dared admit. Weh had not initially ordered the LP back, because it had taken nearly thirty minutes of cat ‘n’ mouse in the pitch dark before it began to focus: a large NVA force was closing in on Bravo Company, bypassing the LP until they were only an island in the stream of enemy soldiers. Weh finally radioed the squad leader to bring his team in, then radioed Schirmerhorn to send men to guide them back into the lines.

Then the LP’s radio went dead.

The squad sent out by Schirmerhorn took fire as soon as they advanced from their foxholes. At the same time, Campbell’s LP came under fire. Then came a barrage of RPG and AK47 fire against Schirmerhorn’s side of the line, then a scrambling rush of North Vietnamese into their perimeter.

The listening posts had served their purpose: the lines had been put on a 100 percent alert before the NVA could finalize their attack, and artillery was already up. When the Bravo LP abruptly disappeared from the radio net, Fagan was in the process of calling back the Delta LP. They too had begun to take fire. The LP was from the 2d Platoon under 2dLt Denny Taylor (replacing Lieutenant Peters who had rotated to the rear two weeks earlier); as the LP began moving back under fire, Fagan radioed Taylor to send out a squad to help them in. The squad managed to link up with the listening post, but the NVA were almost on them. They flung grenades at each other on sound. AK rounds snapped past in the blackened brush until, finally, PFC Cornelius J. Cashman dropped to one knee. He cradled his M60 butt against his hip, sling over his shoulder, and told the others to get moving. He would cover them. Cashman was not an inexperienced new guy or a renegade looking for trouble; if any stereotype fit, it was of the All American Boy. Cashman shouted, “I’ll be right there, I’ll be right there,” as he scythed the brush with his sixty, keeping the NVA back long enough for the rest to slip back. Inside Delta Company’s perimeter, Lieutenant Taylor made a quick head count. Cashman was not there. His M60 was silent. Taylor’s radio report to Fagan was emotional, but Fagan would not allow a search party. He was probably dead, the NVA were still coming, and they could not afford such a gap in their lines. Fagan made a mental note to put Cashman in for the Navy Cross, and only hoped that if the kid were still alive, he would keep his cool and hide in the bushes until dawn.

Charlie Company was also under fire from RPGs and AK47s; it was sustained, but seemed designed only to keep them in place. The grunts sat tight in their holes, suffering only a few shrapnel wounds, awaiting the assault that never materialized. Lieutenant Hord’s hole was near where Lieutenant Colonel Dowd was hunched over his radios. They could hear Weh desperately calling his LP. No answer. A squad of Marines was missing and, in the middle of it, Dowd was getting inquiries from regiment and division. Everyone feared the worst and Hord could see the anguish and frustration in Dowd’s eyes. The colonel was a fighter, but this was not a battle of his design. No one really knew what was happening. The only option was to hunker down and weather it out. As they waited for dawn, Dowd told Hord they’d march over to the
Hot Dog at first light and take it from there. His voice was charged with one desire—swift retaliation.

Lance Corporal Wells was half-asleep in his foxhole after the initial melee on the H&S Company hill. An RPG or mortar exploded nearby. It showered him with dirt and sent him scurrying for their trench. The slit trench was only three feet deep, and there were a dozen Marines crouched in it. The firing was creeping closer and there was an air of high-strung anticipation as the men fingered their weapons and strained their eyes. No one was firing, though; there were other Marines down the hill and, even in the flare light, things were indistinct.

An M60 crew was set up in front of the trench in a little scooped pit. Wells kneeled with them and squinted through their GreenEye; it cast an eerie lime fuzz across the battlefield, but individuals stood out. To their left, he could see grunts from Bravo Company. There were NVA right up with them; farther to the right, there were more still. These NVA seemed to be milling around. The assistant gunner took back the scope and used it to adjust the gunner’s fire. The Marine cranked a few tracers into the milling group, locked on the target, then started pumping his M60 around that spot. Wells and the rest in the trench opened fire too, triggering M16 tracers into the spot where the M60 tracers were bouncing.

Wells really couldn’t see a thing.

Nearby, the 81mm mortars were pumping out a constant barrage. High explosive, white phosphorus, illumination. An occasional line of green tracers punched across the hill. Mortars impacted; a few RPGs whirl-banged in. Zotter caught fast glimpses around his mortar pit. Ilium rounds floated down on parachutes and tracers arched through the black. A corpsman was shouting, “Bring your wounded over here!” Four silhouettes at a time moved towards the shout, a fifth Marine invisible between them in a poncho. There were moans. An officer shouted, “Keep your eye on that body!” There was a dead NVA near the perimeter, naked except for shorts, lying on his back with one knee up. A gangly, crazy hillbilly named Pridemore took up a position near the mortar pit. He had a night scope mounted on his rifle and shot an NVA creeping up to retrieve the body. Zotter saw Pridemore in the morning; he had the scope carefully wrapped and he nodded to it, grinning, “That makes nine.”